Top Ten (14 page)

“Heretics were dealt with in this fashion,” Michaelangelo said. He twisted the propane bottle and torch this way and that, making the blue flame dance in the dim light. “The procedure was known as the cauldron.”

Lee Tran shook his head at the flame. Michaelangelo wondered if he knew what was about to happen. Or if he was just afraid of fire.

He lowered the blue flame to the bowl and began to work it around. Lee Tran screamed his muffled scream and fought. Michaelangelo held him somewhat still with his free hand.

“You’ll feel them in a minute.”

He was right sooner than expected.

Lee Tran stopped his thrashing very suddenly and raised his head to look at the bowl fixed securely to his abdomen. Little gray paws and claws were trying to slip between the bowl and his skin, but the space was not big enough for escape. There was nowhere for them to go as their makeshift prison heated up.

Except, of course, there was.

“It’s the creation that is art’s glory,” Michaelangelo said, just as Lee Tran felt the first rat start to gnaw through the skin of his abdomen. His cries against the pain, the agony rising, beat against the gag, but could not dislodge it. “The ‘after’ is the piece. It’s the ‘during’ that determines greatness.”

There were five small rats trapped in the upturned bowl, and the world that was theirs at the moment was setting to burn. As blue flame washed over the bowl’s silvery surface, it began to change, to glow, to shift between glorious blacks and blues and reds, and within the confines of its miniature hell the rats were driven to frenzy. By the heat, the smell, the sound, the
pain
. They had to get out.

And out meant down.

Out meant
through
.

“MMMMNNNNNNNN!!!”

It could not quite be called a scream. It was horror given voice. And it spewed from Lee Tran’s choked off mouth like the banshee wail of some demon’s beast.

“Process,” Michaelangelo said as Lee Tran felt the first of the rats burrow through his skin and writhe among his entrails, “is what makes art
art
.”

One rat followed another and the pair began gnawing through the soft folds of Lee Tran’s stomach. The next two to make it in headed south, munching their way through the large and small intestines as the body, the tortured thing that was twenty seven year old Lee Tran, began to spasm. His eyes rolled back in his head. His neck and back arched severely. The throes that rattled him were not controlled, but random, simply his body responding an overwhelming administration of pain and abuse.

“Process is what makes a master a master,” Michaelangelo said, just as the first rat pushed the gag from Lee Tran’s mouth and scurried out. The other seemed stuck in the esophagus, as the writhing bulge in Lee Tran’s blocked throat could attest.

The young criminal stilled finally, the uncontrolled dervish afflicting his body gone. Blood trickled from his mouth, and spread across the legs of his boxers, and soon after that a single rat popped out through the leg hole and dropped to the ground, scampering away to corners dark. Higher up the commotion in Lee Tran’s throat ceased. That left three unaccounted for, Michaelangelo thought. For the moment, at least.

He pulled the flame back from the glowing bowl and cut it off. Some of Lee Tran’s flesh had cooked near the rim. Michaelangelo sniffed the scent. It made his nose twitch. It made him smile.

“Work to be done,” he said to Lee Tran. For a moment he waited for a reaction. When none came he took out his knife and set about the remainder of the process.

Eleven

Blind Man’s Bluff

Mills looked back over his shoulder to what Alfaro’s crew in Medellin had loaded and thought Gareth must be truly desperate.

One hundred pounds. That was what Gareth had sent him down for. That was
all
Gareth had sent him down for. A hundred lousy pounds of cocaine. Mills shook his head and looked back out the Cessna’s windscreen.

The sun was a thin line of blue far off to his right on the eastern horizon. Wednesday had come. Another day. Just another day.

Tomorrow would come, too, he knew. And the day after that. And the day after that. One by one by one the days would come and time would pass and he would get closer, and closer, and closer to being done with this life. Soon. Like he had told his pop, had promised his pop, it would be soon.

But it would never be soon enough.

He put his sunglasses on as a spark of yellow rose above the eastern horizon. Some distance ahead there was weather to think of. He was nearing the southern coast of Louisiana. There would be air traffic to deal with. Radars were beginning to paint him. He must be conscious of those. So much to do. So much to occupy him. Being busy was good.

But not always.

“Cessna Three Three Niner Papa Edward, respond.”

He heard the radio call in his headset and looked quickly out the left side window. Nothing abeam or behind. And out the right side window next to see if—

“Damn,” Mills swore when he saw the blue and white Citation shadowing him above and slightly to the east. He didn’t need to be close enough to see the seal on its side to know it was a Customs interdictor. Fast, maneuverable, and on him like a hawk.

Shit. How long has he been there?

“Cessna aircraft displaying tail number Three Three Niner Papa Edward, a response is demanded. This is Tango Alpha Seven, United States Customs Service.”

Damn. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck and damn. He was ten minutes from the coast, just ten fucking minutes! And this! He thought. Ran through his head what they’d be doing right now. They were close enough in that the crew would be calling in the cavalry, probably a pair of UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, fast and maneuverable and loaded with men with guns. Lots of men with guns. Men with guns who could be on top of him before he stopped his roll-out—assuming he made it down in one piece.

“Shit!” Mills swore once more, and gave the Citation another glance. Then ahead he turned his attention. The Shell Keys were beginning to shimmer under the day’s new light. Beyond them, though, Marsh Island was just a ghost of its fog shrouded self. He would have to get down. Down and fast. Lost in the soup before the Blackhawks could get on him. If he could lose the Citation—correction, make
it
lose
him
—then he had a shot at getting out of this. A shot.

“Cessna Three Three Niner Papa Edward, this is you—”

Mills shut the radio off and firewalled the throttles, pointing his aircraft at the water between the Shell Keys and Marsh Island. He had to break their visual on him. Then he could worry about their radar.

*   *   *

“There he goes,” Tango Alpha Seven’s pilot commented as the Cessna 402 just ahead and below him to port began to dive. “Are the tac teams airborne?”

In the seat behind him the communication’s officer keyed his intercom. “Be on him in ten.”

“All right, let’s watch this guy,” the pilot said and put his plane in a slight dive. “He’s heading for the clouds.”

“Good luck,” the right seater wished the pilot of the Cessna, though he doubted luck was going to help him any. Luck
or
clouds, not with the picture they had of him on the cockpit radar screen. And he couldn’t outrun that, or outsmart it. No, the radar unit humming away in the nose of their bird was just about as good as what the military used, and to his way of thinking, that was plenty good enough to bag them a twin engine Cessna with a drug running scum at the stick. Oh yeah.

*   *   *

Two thousand feet, nineteen hundred feet... Mills watched the altimeter spin down. At a thousand feet he began to level off. By six hundred he was wings level just shy of Marsh Island. He took a quick look back and saw the Citation disappear as he flew into the clouds.

When he looked back to the front the world was a wall of white. He was flying blind.

Almost blind. He had nav beacons along the coast and inland, and he knew the altitude of obstacles he’d be encountering on the far side of Weeks Bay. Still, this was not the way he liked to fly. He didn’t know many pilots who preferred zero visibility to fifty miles blue and bright. At least no civilian pilots. Then again, he was not truly a civilian pilot. Hadn’t been trained as one. And he was about to put those old skills to use.

*   *   *

“Whoa, where’s he going?” the right seater asked aloud. Their quarry had just made a right turn. A sharp right turn to—. “He’s cutting across! Across!”

Tango Alpha Seven’s pilot pulled his aircraft up, giving the lunatic they were chasing plenty of room. He was still a good five hundred feet below them, but he was not taking any chances. Not with some fool who would fly across his front.

“He’s off radar,” the right seater said. “He got behind us.”

“Not for long,” the pilot said and began a tight turn to the right.

*   *   *

Five hundred feet above Weeks Bay, pulling as tight a turn as the Cessna 402 could at top speed, Mills was about to put his faith in Nico Trane’s little ‘extra’. Upgraded avionics and radios, superior night vision gear—none of that would help him right now. All were part of the normal equipment complement that Mills had turned to the top flight system’s mechanic for on all his planes. But now, considering the spot he was in, and Nico’s assertion that his addition might come in handy, Mills was beginning to think that beyond being one hell of a grease monkey, Nico might also be a pretty fair psychic at that.

“Maybe we’ll see about a pardon for you, Nico,” Mills said, and pressed the first of four small release plungers the prescient mechanic had installed on the throttle hump. A click and a whoosh emanated from the extreme aft of the Cessna and, without seeing a thing, he could just imagine the thousands of thin mylar strips clouding the air in his wake.

*   *   *

The right seater saw it first. Actually, didn’t see it first. The ‘it’ being the Cessna 402 that had been clear on their radar screen just a few seconds before. Now the whole damn electronic picture was a dazzle of electronic noise.

“What the...”

Tango Alpha Seven’s pilot glanced at the screen. He needed no more than that see what had happened. He was pissed...and more than a little impressed. “Chaff.”

“Chaff?” the right seater asked, incredulous. Not that he needed explanation what chaff was. He had four years in the Air Force in his past, crewing on transports mostly, but he had not been so removed from potential combat situations that he wasn’t aware of the effect thousands of thin foil-like strips cast into the air could have on radar. It was the effect he was seeing now. But...

...where the hell did this guy get chaff?

“Anything?” the pilot asked, less than hopeful in his query.

“Yeah,” the right seater answered, adjusting his controls frantically. “A whole lotta nothing.”

Tango Alpha Seven’s pilot shook his head and started bringing the Citation’s nose up. There was no way he was going to stay on the tail of this guy, not when he couldn’t see him....visually or electronically. “We’re off him.”

The right seater looked to his pilot. “Let me work this.”

“That’s not a military set,” the pilot reminded him. If it had been, they might have been able to defeat the unexpected countermeasures from the Cessna. But it wasn’t. And there was no way they were gonna make it so. “We’re off this guy, okay?”

The right seater thumped the map strapped to his flightsuit’s leg and shook his head at the soup outside the windscreen. That and made a little wish that their well equipped quarry out there somewhere would fly himself into the side of a lonely old mountain someday. Or worse.

Twelve

The Dead and the Dying

Unit 12, Redy Stor, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The door of the long and narrow unit was up. It had been that way when the night manager did a drive-through of the facility at six that morning.

Special Agent Ariel Grace stood just outside the unit staring in. The light differential made seeing difficult. But see could see enough. Almost too much.

Jaworski came out of Unit 12, lifting the yellow tape to pass under. A forensic team from the local Field Office remained inside.

“Art,” Jaworski commented to Ariel. He glanced back in at Lee Tran, suspended upside down from a ceiling beam, hands bonded to the concrete floor as if doing a handstand. A headless handstand. His gut was hollowed out and his severed head stuffed in there, facing out, and it seemed to Jaworski at least that the young and very dead fugitive was smiling at him. Some glue to the cheeks he thought likely.

“He has boxers on,” Ariel said.

Jaworski knew where she was going. “No mutilation. That makes two now.” Though boned and folded in a neat naked package, Francis Gunther had retained his penis.

“These are different to him,” Ariel said.

“We know that, Grace,” Jaworski said with some shortness. He put a hand to his temple and rubbed. The early call, the hurry up flight, the thought of another meeting with his doctors the next morning. The combination had given him a Grade A pounder. Either that or he now had a brain tumor, and wouldn’t that be just his luck. “Ignore me. I’m mad at the world.”

Ariel was herself right then, looking in at Lee Tran’s grotesque acrobatic positioning. Mad at a little part of it, anyway. Whatever part had created the monster that was doing this.

“Has his attorney been found yet?” Ariel asked.

Jaworski brought his hand down and shook his head.

“Prints in there?” she asked further.

“Plenty.” He had seen some himself, bright in blood. “Walls, floor, Tran.”

“Why couldn’t he just have gotten in a bar fight once,” Ariel said wishfully. “Gotten busted, printed.”

“He’s a good citizen,” Jaworski said. “That Gacy freak was a clown at kids’ parties, for Christ’s sake. Maybe ours is president of his lodge in his spare time.”

Ariel looked hard at Michaelangelo’s ghastly creation and doubted that. “I don’t think he has spare time sir. He works at this. He
thinks
about it. All the time.”

Jaworski turned away from Unit 12. “Then we’re even, ‘cause I can’t get this bastard out of my head either. Come on.”